A wee review of The Iron Lady

Last night, I went to see The Iron Lady. I have very low expectations when I go to see any Hollywood movie, but I must say, I give this one two thumbs up.

It has some shortcomings, of course. Some lines are given to Thatcher that simply don’t ring true, for example. One of them comes very early on when she tells Dennis, her soon-to-be husband, who has just proposed to her, that she won’t be a regular woman, “life must be about more than just washing teacups,” or something to that effect. It doesn’t ring true as something Thatcher would say. It sounds too feminist, and she wasn’t one, and is unnecessarily offensive to most every mother in the audience. Heck, I was offended, and I am not a mother.

There are also one or two other moments where I thought this isn’t Thatcher, this is Meryl Streep vying for an Oscar.

That said, I do hope Meryl Streep does get an Oscar for her performance here. Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as a tough, sensible, hard working and concerned Prime Minister. That there are shortcomings around some of her lines, some of the history, even the controversy over whether one should depict a woman yet living as having dementia doesn’t change that.

Have you ever gone to listen to great piano concert and thought, I must become a pianist, immediately? Or have you been to the ballet and subsequently wished you could dance? This movie had me leaving thinking I should run and become Prime Minister. To leave our great nation in a better position than how I found it (that was said in a British accent). It’s that kind of movie, and that can only be a good thing.

Feminists would deprecate my father (and I) as an unenlightened patriarch, but in our family discussions he did always speak respectfully of the Iron Lady. He likened her to Deborah, the self-described “mother in Israel”, who because of the lack of real men there, had to take charge. When Barak requested that she accompany him into battle, she replied that the honour of the victory would then also go to a woman.